Tracking issue RE: Paperclip, Azure EOL, rest client, etc

[mjankowski]

Background

• For file attachment on various DB models throughout the app, Mastodon relies on paperclip
• With the introduction of Rails activestorage solution, the original paperclip gem was deprecated in 2018
• There is a kt-paperclip fork that is more or less maintained, and which Mastodon now uses instead of paperclip
• We support various storage backends, including Azure
• For azure specifically, we rely on md-paperclip-azure which is itself a fork of the orignal paperclip-azure gem (not updated in ~5 years) and provides an interface between paperclip and the official azure gem.

Issues

• The situation where we are using a fork of an unmaintained adapter (azure) to interface with a fork of an unmaintained gem (paperclip) feels a bit precarious, but the migration from paperclip to AS would be one of the more substantial code and data/storage migrations we've attempted both on dev side and on instance admin side.
• The azure-storage-ruby gem will be retired in Sep 2024, in favor of using the REST api directly.
• The azure-storage-common gem is our last remaining gem with a hard version lock to faraday 1.x, which prevents updating there.

[mjankowski]

Maybe relevant - rails/rails#49983 (comment) - someone is working on a replacement gem for azure/activestorage which sounds like it will implement just the subset of the Azure REST API that is needed by AS.

This might be good to either use directly or build a paperclip adapter on top of.

[JoeDupuis]

I would need to look at kt-paperclip after I am done with AS, I could look into making the gem work for paperclip too. I don't think it would be hard to support both 🤔
I might need to find a more generic name for the gem though 😆

[renchap]

@JoeDupuis I have not looked at your code yet, but maybe you could have a gem that implements the required Azure API calls (simple-azure-storage?), and a second one to interface it with AS (simple-azure-storage-activestorage), and we build our own simple-azure-storage-paperclip?

[JoeDupuis]

I renamed the Gem to azure-blob-storage. It's pretty close to azure-storage-blob. It might change again if Rails core think it's a problem.
Nothing in it make it specific to Active Storage.

[renchap]

Link to azure-blob-storage: https://github.com/JoeDupuis/azure-blob-storage

[JoeDupuis]

After discussing it internally, I will be renaming it to azure-blob later tonight. It's too close to the existing gem name.
Sorry for the flip flop.

It should make it easier to use too (shorter namespace).

[JoeDupuis]

Done, I've renamed the gem:
https://github.com/JoeDupuis/azure-blob
https://rubygems.org/gems/azure-blob